The aim of this briefing
is to summarise the main points of the
declaration in anticipation of the release
of the official transcript. Readers are
advised that unauthorised
recordings and transcripts now circulating in the
Internet cannot be authenticated and
may be unreliable.

The Joint Statement by INS
General Secretary Tom McCarthy and Chief
Philosopher Simon Critchley consists
of a series of numbered theses on inauthenticity.

They begin with
the failure of transcendence and the
copies of this failure which are recorded
in the history of art, philosophy and
literature.

They identify, on the one
hand, the slippery slope on which one
slides upwards towards “essence” and “ideal”,
a well-worn path for the tourists of
the sublime looking for a glimpse of
themselves “shattering
themselves against death” as Heidegger
(14) would fancy, or taking a swan-dive
into the volcano like Empedocles (19).

On the other hand, the theses identify
a more resistant slope which Bataille
called “l’informe” — the
formless which opposes the Platonic world
of forms, a universe that “‘resembles
nothing’ and ‘gets itself
squashed everywhere, like a spider or
earthworm’” (10).

All art
and literature is divided between these
two temptations: either to extinguish
matter and elevate it into form or to
let matter matter by making form as formless
as possible. The INS delivers itself
solidly to the second temptation: to
let matter matter, to let form touch
absence, ellipsis and debris (8).

The
INS Chief Philosopher and General Secretary
explain that what matters for the INS
are “not the imperial dreams in
the head of the polar explorer Ernest
Shackleton but rather his blackened,
frostbitten toes which, after the white
space into which he’d ventured
and on which he hoped to write his name
solidified and crushed his boat, he and
his crew were forced to chop from their
own feet, cook on their stove and eat.
Necronauts are poets of the antipodes
of poetry, artists of art’s
polar opposite, its Antartica” (sic,
9).

The
Statement declares the death of tragedy
in which the lonely hero, in death, is
rewarded with authentic being. Instead
it calls for the comic, the divided
and the repetitive: instead of Oedipus,
Wile E. Coyote who, like a true necronaut, “dies
almost without noticing” (19),
again and again, repeatedly.

The Statement
navigates a course from the individual,
to the dividual (11), thence to the residual, “a
remainder that remains: a shard, a leftover,
a trace” (33),
and further to the risidual, a laughable
doubling. “What distinguishes the
poet or philosopher from others,” the
Statement says, “is that he can
laugh at himself. That is, he can
simultaneously be the one who trips and
the one who watches the trip: he can
split himself in two — what
Baudelaire calls dédoublement” (17).

All
cults of authenticity, it is declared,
whether they celebrate it in the guise
of transcendence, unity or totality,
for aesthetic, religious or political
ends, “should
be abandoned” (12).

The aim of the
declaration is not contemplation. It
is to stuff inauthenticity into our
mouths like Molly Bloom’s seed
cake, and thus with a silent “yes” (38)
to reaffirm the tenets of necronautical
materialism, to repeat: you
are always already a necronaut.

Issued by INS Department of Propaganda.
Official INS propaganda may be freely
distributed, distorted, appropriated
or adapted as the reader sees fit.